The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Communication networks allow users to distribute or stream multimedia data to various computing and electronic devices. These communication networks may be time-aware networks, which enable synchronized presentation of multimedia data via one or more remote devices. Compliance with timing constraints of a time-aware network is typically achieved by transmitting multimedia data at scheduled intervals. These scheduled transmissions are intended to ensure timely delivery of the multimedia data to the remote devices to enable synchronized presentation.
Most communication networks and devices, however, also communicate other types of data, the transmission of which can occur at unscheduled times. The unscheduled transmissions of these other types of data may prevent, or interfere with, the scheduled transmissions of the multimedia data. For example, an ongoing transmission of the other type of data can preempt a start of a scheduled transmission of multimedia data. Preempting the scheduled transmission may delay communication of the multimedia data over the time-aware network until the ongoing transmission of the other data is complete. Delaying transmission of the multimedia data, however, may violate timing constraints of the time-aware network, disrupt the synchronized presentation of the multimedia data, or compromise subsequent network communications.